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Tag Archives for email_filtering

Email Compliance and the use of Email Filtering

Email compliance is a necessary corporate objective to ensure that email communication remains free of inappropriate materials that may damage or strain the relationships between your workforce.  Many managers see the protection against viruses, spyware and email spam as being the highest priority and they are there are a plethora of tools to enable companies to do this pretty well - as this is a mature market, but some organisations overlook content filtering.

Email filtering is a tool to allow both inbound and outbound emails to be scanned for abusive materials that are likely to break existing ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ statements and runs the risk of upsetting staff that read and are hurt or angered by the proliferation of such inappropriate content.

IT Managers have three solutions to implement email filtering: namely, a managed service where emails are scanned whilst travelling between the company and the internet; a server appliance, where emails are scanned within the company network and is automatically configured to run immediately; or a email server add-on program, which is installed, configured and manually maintained by the companies IT department and either installed on the email server or on another dedicated server .  All three solutions are viable for most modern organisations, but the managed service option has most effective content filter as its algorithm for detecting inappropriate content is constantly updated in line with real-time attacks that are happening over many of its own client base.  The effectiveness of the other two in-house solutions depend on the skills of the companies IT department and the email filtering vendors capacity to keep its scanning engine up to date with the latest rules to identify and stop the latest inappropriate content.

Written on 31 December 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Compliance with No Comments
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Want to reduce your business email filtering costs?

Email filtering solutions protect many businesses from inappropriate and damaging email content. Dicontas enhances this protection with a unique solution to reduce annual staff administration costs by 40-80% for companies using an email filtering system, appliance or managed service.

If you are an Email Administrator or Compliance Officer, then please visit the Dicontas - Email Filtering Services website for more benefits on this unique value-added service for any email filtering or email monitoring system.

Written on 14 July 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Company News, Dicontas Services, Services & Products with No Comments
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European Content Security Market reaches $1.8 Billion

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, reveals that revenues in the European Content Security Market totalled $1.80 billion in 2006, and are likely to reach $3.35 million in 2010.

The European content security market is gathering pace, particularly with enterprise security gaining priority due to the ever increasing need to protect critical information from the emerging threats and attacks. Furthermore, employee productivity is becoming an area of focus and in the recent past, Europe has also been reviving its legislative directives, necessitating greater investments in security. These factors, coupled with the growing consolidation, are like to provide entry and exit options for the investment community.

“The European security industry at large is in the limelight, as growing signs of market maturity in the North American region have heightened the focus on the less mature European and the growing Asian markets” notes Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Raja Srinivasan. “Regulatory compliances, employee productivity concerns, and the growing demand for proactive solutions to counter new and innovative security threats are all expected to drive content security investments across Europe.”

Source: Frost & Sullivan

Written on 29 June 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Content Filtering, News with No Comments
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image filtering - the only legal defence against the new UK Harassment law

In a landmark case in 2006 on the subject of bullying in the workplace; the House of Lords have changed the law so as to make employers liable for workplace harassment even if they were not in any way negligent.

The House of Lords decided that the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997 covers the behaviour of employees at work even when the employer has not caused or failed to prevent the offending behaviour. Those employers now have vicarious liability for the acts of employees.

Previously, employees had to prove that the employer was negligent in not stopping bullying taking place and that it had caused them psychological damage.

The new ruling means that companies can be sued even if the company cannot be expected to have known about the bullying, and this ruling is certainly wide enough to include the use of inappropriate image materials as the vehicle for e-bullying.

This decision has serious implications for employers as it gives employees who are bullied or harassed at work a further basis on which to claim compensation from their employers. Moreover, some of the existing limitations and defences will not be available. For example, an employer has a defence under existing discrimination legislation if it can show that it took all reasonably practicable steps to prevent discriminatory harassment occurring – this defence was recently made out where an employer had implemented an effective harassment policy. This would not help an employer facing a claim that it was vicariously liable for an employee’s harassment under the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997.

As we know that harassment takes place in the workplace through the use of pornographic images, it seems that the only avenue forward for employers in avoiding the breadth of this decision is to technologically interdict the harassment and the inappropriate image content employed therein so as to stop it reaching the intended target.

This new law should make employers realise that an effective email and image filtering solution is now a must for any digital workplace and is now the only legal defence in terms of the law and vicarious liability.

Source: image-analyzer.com

Written on 24 May 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Content Filtering with No Comments
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MessageLabs upgrades content security services

MessageLabs on Thursday announced upgrades to its content and image control service offerings that feature greater accuracy and can scan more document types for allowable content.

MessageLabs’ Email Content Control 3.0 and Email Image Control 2.0 are offered as managed services that scan inbound and outbound e-mails for inappropriate, confidential or malicious content sent or received by an organization’s employees. The services help companies implement acceptable e-mail use policies and ensure compliance with a range of government and industry regulations, according to company officials.

The upgraded services now feature the ability to scan within Microsoft Office document attachments and include customizable notifications, so that e-mail administrators can change the text within a notification to better fit the organization, they say.

Email Content Control 3.0 also features a reorganized management interface that makes rule details easier to find, and can decompress files for scanning. The service can use the same security policies implemented by a company’s e-mail system, and rules can be set on a user-by-user basis, officials say. Email Image Control 2.0 includes new algorithms for analysing image attributes in order to accurately distinguish inappropriate content, officials say.

“Businesses are increasingly dependent on email as a primary communication tool,” said Michael D. Osterman, President, Osterman Research. “But it presents several risks for controlling confidential and valuable information from leaving the organization. Content filtering — inspecting the content of messages before they are sent — will assume a more important role within messaging management as a means of mitigating risks and managing corporate liability, and to make businesses feel more confident about their email systems.”

Written on 15 March 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under News with No Comments
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Cisco to acquire IronPort Systems to get into the fast-growing email security market

On 4 January 2007, Cisco announced a definitive agreement to acquire IronPort Systems, a provider of enterprise messaging security products.

The IronPort acquisition will allow Cisco to move into the fast-growing e-mail security market, which is currently valued at approximately $850 million and growing at a rate of approximately 40% annually. The key technology value that Cisco will receive is a strategic foundation on which to begin building a security infrastructure for unified communications, including e-mail.

Gartner Analysis : The consolidation in the e-mail security market is now almost complete. Other vendors will find it difficult to compete with industry leaders Cisco, Microsoft and Symantec in the enterprise market. IBM and (potentially) Juniper Networks are the only other major vendors that have a strategic interest in this market, though BorderWare and Proofpoint remain as respected independent players. Gartner believes the two remaining service providers, MessageLabs and Postini, will likely be acquired by telecom providers in their respective markets.

Extracted from Gartner - IronPort Buy Will Make Cisco a Major E-Mail Security Player

Written on 09 January 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under News with No Comments
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2006 - a good year for making online businesses safe with managed filtering services

2006 has been a good year for the providers of managed filtering services and in many cases web and email filtering services have come together through partnership or acquisition to provide both from a single source.For instance, UK-based web filtering vendor ScanSafe has seen 100 per cent growth in seats served by its web filtering service. It is now selling as much in the US as in Europe, has set up in Asia and now has around 40 partnerships with internet service providers. But perhaps its biggest coup has been to reach a partnership agreement with Postini, a leading provider of email filtering services.

Postini has also expanded rapidly in the last few years, not quite at the rate of growth as spam itself but not far off that. It claims the number one position in the market for hosted email filtering. Expanding its business to include web filtering is an obvious choice for Postini as the email filtering nears saturation (although Postini continues to gain customers from churn in the market). Postini has 100s of ISP partners which could provide a lucrative route to market for its new web-filtering offering.

This has not gone unnoticed by other vendors. McAfee, the world’s largest pure-play IT security company, has itself formed a partnership with Postini and is reselling its managed filtering services. Microsoft made a couple of acquisitions recently—FrontBridge for email filtering and FutureSoft’s Dynacom I-Filter (buying its web filtering product, not the company)—so now has the capability to offer both services.

Two other UK companies, BlackSpider and SurfControl, got together in 2006 to achieve a similar goal. BlackSpider is a competitor to Postini that also provides a managed email filtering service. SurfControl has long been a competitor in the web filtering market. Along with companies such as Secure Computing and WebSense it provides filters for controlling what employees can do on the web. The aim of bringing the two companies together is to leverage one’s web filtering heritage with the other’s experience of providing a managed service.

Not to be left out, yet another UK company with a global presence, MessageLabs, also launched a hosted web filtering service in July 2006, to sit alongside its well established email filtering service. MessageLabs has a partnership with IBM, bringing the world’s number two IT vendor in to play (yes, if you haven’t already heard, HP’s latest quarterly figures allowed it to claim top spot).

Using managed filtering services is proving to be one of the most effective means of controlling web and email traffic.

Source : IT-director.com - 22/12/06 - Written by Quocirca

Written on 07 January 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Monitoring, News with No Comments
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